Microsoft recently apologized for an Azure Active Directory issue that disrupted access to Office 365 applications and the Azure Admin Portal for two hours or more for some users. Microsoft conducted a root cause analysis in an attempt to offer an explanation on what caused the outage.
In the root cause analysis notice, Microsoft said that a cross-cloud migration operation that was intended to improve the Azure AD service, ended up disrupting services for some organizations. The outage occurred on March 15 for users of the Azure Admin Portal, Teams, Exchange, Azure KeyVault, SharePoint, Storage and other major applications.
The notice also mentioned that Microsoft is currently working on a two-stage process, called the safe deployment process, to improve the Azure AD service. As part of the plan, Microsoft has already completed the first stage of this Safe Deployment Process for the Azure AD service. The second stage is said to be completed by the mid of 2021.
It is to be noted that this incident isn’t the first of its kind for Azure AD. Microsoft added that a similar incident previously occurred in September 2020 were users of Microsoft 365 services experienced various outages tied to the Azure AD service. However, Microsoft promised that the Safe Deployment Process will eliminate such issues from happening again.